The highest ranking detective at the NYPD is taking aim at his bosses as he heads out the door — blasting the way he says the department pushes out its top chiefs when new commissioners take over.
“When you get up this high, you serve at the pleasure of the commissioner,” Essig, 61, told The Post in an exclusive interview in his 13th-floor office at One Police Plaza.
“Do I wish things were done differently? 100%,” he said. “But it’s happened to people before me.”
Essig, who has been with the department for nearly 41 years, is being pushed out nearly two years before the mandatory retirement age of 63. He will leave Sept. 5.
He joins Chief of Housing Kathleen O’Reilly and Chief of Transit Jason Wilcox, who were both shown the door in December also before they aged out.
“Those people dedicated their whole lives to this job,” Essig said. “They love this thing. Then, all of a sudden they call: ‘Thirty days you’re gone.’”
For Essig, the job is outside of 1 Police Plaza and in the field, where he worked for 37 years.
“This is little petty, stupid quarrels, stuff like that,” he said of headquarters. “I stood away from that for my whole career. And I’m going to walk out my head high knowing I tried to do the right thing.”
And the outgoing chief also criticized the NYPD’s version of community policing.
“It’s not, to me, having a barbecue with 100 kids,” he said. “That’s great. But how did you affect their lives? My thing is, when people call 911 or 311, you show up, you act professionally, and you do your job. That’s community policing. That’s what the people want.”
Essig called former Police Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell was a professional and that the two had a close relationship during her time as top cop. She resigned in June, leading to reports that she was micromanaged by Mayor Adams’ administration.
“Every day I was briefing her on something and she knew what we were doing,” Essig said. “We had a great relationship.”
Essig said he never planned to serve beyond 2021, when former Police Commissioner Dermott Shea’s term ended, but he and his detectives were bombarded by a surge in city crime.
“Every imaginable crime happened,” Essig said. “And the one thing I’m most proud of is in each and every case, with a few exceptions, we solved that within 24 hours and had the guy in cuffs.”
At the start of 2022, Kristal Bayron-Nieves, 19, was shot in the chest by a robber after handing over $100 while working at a Burger King in East Harlem.
The shooter was wearing a black ski mask when he pistol whipped a manager and killed the teen Jan. 9, leaving cops little to go on. But a “sharp-eyed detective” was able to change that when he saw a man with earbuds hanging out of his pocket on subway video.
“He goes to the far end, out of camera, changes his clothes,” Essig recalled. “When he was walking back, he was wearing different clothes and a hat but had the earbud hanging out of his pocket.”
Cops were able to trail the killer’s steps and identify him as Winston Glynn, who was arrested.
His biggest case was the subway shooting that left 10 people shot on an N train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on April 12, 2022. Essig had 30 or 40 cops gather in a room to go over the facts.
They quickly discovered the shooter had left the key for a U-Haul truck behind, tracked the truck to Philadelphia, identified the shooter as Frank James and released his photo.
Tips to the NYPD’s hotline poured in with James even calling one in on himself. He was arrested the next day.
Essig, who worked all over the Bronx and Brooklyn, has been married for 39 years and has two sons on the job and a daughter who’s a school teacher. His wife has endured constant phone calls, texts and crazy hours because of his job, he said.
“If I had to come in at 11 at night, I’d come in,” he said. “I was still able to coach my kids in football and baseball. I never missed anything because your home life is more important than this. This is going to end, but I’m still going to have my wife and kids.”
